The pilots of the seaplane, though beautifully uniformed, are unshod: Their bare feet on the pedals are as tensile as hands. For 45 minutes we roar in a straight line between the flat blue plates of sea and sky, over the big, pale lung shapes of reefs and the occasional neat green-furred island. The horizontal is so unrelieved that the feeling is one of suspense in an unending vanishing point. There is nothing to navigate by, until the plane begins to descend and specific things start to become visible again: an island, richly forested, with a diadem of white sand and strange architectural forms showing glimpses of themselves amid the trees. Gathered on a wooden jetty out over the water is a line of people dressed in white uniforms, waving; a taller beige-clad sunburned man, the manager, stands in their midst. Out on the jetty we are led along the line to shake hands with the staff, like the queen. How was your trip, they say, one after another. Everyone is smiling. We are given glasses of champagne. I try to carry my suitcase, but it is whisked away down the jetty on a white buggy upholstered in beige leather. The seaplane turns on its flipper-like feet and roars away up into the sky again, leaving us here.

“Here” is the Maldives, the sine qua non of the modern lotus-eater: a place of near-frictionless reality whose diaspora of 1,000 or so wafer-like islands offers so little resistance to the imagination that it has become a pure canvas of holiday-making fantasy. It is one of the world’s most coveted honeymoon destinations, though perhaps coveted is the wrong word to describe this dovetailing of uniqueness with mass production. Between this year and last, ten new luxury resorts will have opened, a consciously doomed enterprise since it is likely that in only a few decades’ time, rising sea levels will have sunk the whole show. Of marriage, even the most literal-minded will perhaps allow the metaphor. The Maldivians have the highest divorce rate in the world, a fact which to my mind uniquely qualifies them to officiate over the interment by water of the connubial myth.

In a world where reality is no obstacle, the fiction of romance ought to thrive.

We are ushered toward another white buggy to be conveyed to our room. It is my lifelong habit to separate myself immediately from anything I am compelled by others to do: I would rather walk, in any case, to get my bearings. It is clear that this course of action would be incomprehensible, as well as extremely impolite, to those who have come to greet us. I feel guilty that they have had to wave and smile and stand in a line, despite the fact that they have been paid to do it. I feel sure there is something else they’d rather be doing, and that if I carried my own suitcase and walked they’d be at liberty to do it. This is a situation I have frequently found myself in when managing questions of power and obligation in human relationships. It is the reason I have rarely occupied a position of responsibility. It is also, I suppose, why taking a holiday in a luxury resort like this one has never occurred to me.

We are staying in one of a curving line of houses that extend out away from the island and over the water on stilts. In the morning, when I go out and stand on the wooden deck, the feeling of suspension in the warm blue motionless void creates a strange sensation of incorporeality. My body, customarily the reliable whipping boy of my mind, has somehow detached itself. I feel neither hunger nor tiredness nor even my usual restlessness, the thing that at home compels me to run and walk for miles in order to purge myself of it. This is fortunate, as it turns out, since the island is only an eighth of a mile long. Sandy paths make little circuits through its neatly lush interior: It takes just a few minutes to walk around the whole thing, greeted and waved to all the way. The possibility of losing oneself, I realize, has been central to my past experiences of travel. The anxiety was not to escape but to stay connected, to make sure that the necessities for survival had been met, the rudiments of language grasped, the foreign mechanisms understood. Here, despite our isolation in this desert of blue-green water, the challenge is to find privacy.

Until recently, the island was uninhabited. The story of its development is intriguing, a costly and intricate process of dismantling something and then reassembling it to look more or less like what it was, with the difference being that now it can be seen and experienced by other people. The parallel with novel-writing is—to me, at least—striking, more so for the fact that in this example the element of art has been given a central place in the illusion. We tour the buildings, all of them extraordinary feats of aestheticism and design: the whale-shaped bar in whose body you sit while the sun sets beyond its open mouth; the beautiful husk-like building that feels as if you’re inside a wood-paneled ear of corn; the whorled library like a great shell, its ceiling spiraling upward; the pod-like spa rooms, suspended over the water along tendril-shaped walkways. The staff—there are 250 of them—tell the story of its evolution with amazement: At each stage, the impossible became actual before their eyes. Three weeks ago, apparently, they moved the beach. It was on the wrong side of the island for watching the sunset.

It is hard, on these man-made shores, not to ponder the role of illusion in the ritualization by marriage of our most flawed and intimate needs. In a world where reality is no obstacle, the fiction of romance ought to thrive. My husband and I have five between us—marriages, that is—and perhaps consider ourselves to have attained a kind of seniority in the subject, two professors emeritus of romantic disenchantment. In the amniotic atmosphere of our floating hut, we recall past honeymoons. He spent one in Venice where he awoke the first morning to discover that his face had been devoured by mosquitoes during the night, and was so swollen that he went around looking like John Hurt in The Elephant Man for the rest of the holiday. My own recollections include a week spent crying in terror on a ski slope in Zermatt, before being knocked virtually unconscious by a passing chairlift. We have married again, we believe, not to disown our failures but to atone for them: For good or ill, marriage is our form, and in that same form we hope to redeem ourselves.

But the black comedy of the honeymoon, it seems, would still have us as its butt. In the beachside restaurant, over a plate of perfectly grilled calamari, I suddenly sense the rising of waves: They are emanating not from the shallow waters of the artificial lagoon but from my own stomach. We return to our hut, where I try to ignore these developments by taking a prone position out on the deck in the sun. Forty-five minutes later my skin has turned a raging scarlet. The intensity of the sun, the island doctor tells me regretfully, requires scrupulous acclimatization. He paints me all over with a pink concoction he has mixed carefully in a dish. My husband watches cricket on TV while I lie on our bed, waiting for it to dry. Driven to the bathroom by nausea, I return to find that I have left a pink outline, like a police drawing at a crime scene, on the sheets. The next day, my husband also succumbs to the bug. In the evening, we sit trembling and sweating in the whale-shaped bar, watching the sun set. The other couples all seem to be photographing themselves. One man sets up his camera on an adjacent table: He sits on a sofa with his arm around his partner while it clicks away; after a while he gets up to retrieve it and spends the next hour scrolling through the photos, mesmerized, while she stares out to sea. We watch another couple braving the motionless water on a paddleboard; they push it out a few feet from the beach and then stand on it, wobbling, to photograph themselves with a selfie stick. A speedboat passes with a man and woman standing on its roof, filming themselves with a drone that hovers overhead.

My husband and I have few photographs of ourselves together. In our long journey from seeming to being, more and more of life has taken place off-camera. Amid all the clicking shutters, it is hard not to feel we are in the presence of our own elemental mistakes, the misapprehension of life as a narrative in which we must act a given part, where the personal is only rendered safe when it is made visible to others. We both have photographs of ourselves with other people, in other places: They seem to possess an almost antediluvian innocence, in light of what we now know.

Since the front part of my body is lobster-red, photography is out in any case. We can, however, go snorkeling. Beneath the surface, the world is startlingly, unexpectedly inverted: silent, spacious, plungingly vertical. Amid the bottomless blue-green ravines, we observe the soundless ballet of bright creatures milling and darting and twirling with an unfathomable choreography; we see a turtle vanish into the shadowy deeps in long, skating curves; we see a manta ray unearth itself from the seabed with great rustling motions. As we float together, silenced by our masks, the fact of human intimacy seems suddenly far simpler, merely a part of this great sphere of motion and motive whose purpose must remain mysterious.

On the third day, it starts to rain and doesn’t stop. Our romantic private dinner on the sand is called off. The staff don dashing floor-length raincoats and roll down the plastic covers on the buggies. We sit talking to them on the covered terrace, watching the mountainscape of cloud building and moving overhead. We talk to people from India and Nepal, from Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Mauritius, and, of course, the Maldives. All of them are away from their communities, friends, homes; some of them have partners and children in other countries. Yet they speak about the freedom their work has given them to view their lives more individualistically. Many of them have traveled with the company and have worked together in other locations; the word career is often spoken. Their manager is also far from home: He’s from Cork, in Ireland. When the waiter brings our food and fluffs his lines describing its rare and manifold parts, the manager laughs and puts his arm around him. He tells us about his life here, parenting this 250-strong island-bound family of young men and women at the interface of cultural repression and libertine excess. He is, somehow unexpectedly, a person of great humanity and intelligence. My growing sense of the swindle of romance culture—and the cynical price tag attached to it—is tempered by this reminder of what is, in the end, the basis of all hope: the persistence of individual virtue.

One of the staff, a woman, approaches me shyly with a bag in her hand. She had heard that I was a writer, she said. She had asked the librarian to order one of my books, and was already halfway through. Would I sign it for her? She takes the book out and lays it on the table. It is a memoir I wrote a few years ago about divorce, about the human need to destroy what we have built, in the attempt to be free. I am surprised and slightly unnerved that this is the book she has chosen. It feels a little provocative to have it here, in this paradisiacal petri dish of illusion-building: I’d hate to be called a spoilsport. But I sign my name to it all the same.